


chamomile coffee

by popsky



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Gen, gleefully spoiler-ridden, hidekane if you squint, is there a genre for zip kink, oh kaneki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-19
Updated: 2014-10-19
Packaged: 2018-02-21 18:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2478887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/popsky/pseuds/popsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>it’s more than enough, he thinks. </p>
<p>(it isn’t).</p>
            </blockquote>





	chamomile coffee

**Author's Note:**

> Written to the earlier chapters of Tokyo Ghoul. Title was initially "regurgitation", but [this research](http://http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23826890) inspired me.  
> Beta-ed by the lovely Amariys. <3

 

_chamomile coffee_

 

-

 

There was a knock on the door.

“You need to eat more.” Hide greeted outside the first tiny crack of light, seeping between two frames of wooden door. He was, ironically, thin enough to slip through, and Kaneki didn’t comment on the correspondingly small grocery bag he was carrying, like it was not made to contain real food, either. It rustled softly when Hide took off his shoes.

_Wal-mart,_ Kaneki glanced at the plastic, almost fondly enough that there were visible muscles covering the hollow in his cheeks. Hide seemed to brighten at that.

“How much weight did you lost this time,” and it was not quite a question. Not (yet) a reprimand. Hide pulled absentmindedly at Kaneki’s cheeks, making them look like a glob of bizarre fat rubber. Kaneki wondered when they would finally snap.

“Kaneki.” Hide murmured again.

“Mmm.”

 “I brought coffee.” This time, Kaneki’s entire lips were pulled along with his cheeks, baring all of his teeth. Kaneki hummed an _oh_ , so Hide indeed stopped to actually carry any food, and wondered why it made his stomach heavy instead of relieved.

“Wondered which takeout to bring.” He said intently, looking at Kaneki’s drying gums, and then his eye, “but couldn’t decide what you want. You can’t live on coffee all the time, so.”

“So.”

“Is burger delivery okay?” Hide’s expression was light, like it was supposed to be something simple, as if he was simply having a craving of junk food and intended to involve his best friend in a calorie-drowning oblivion. But there was a subtle query in it, an evaluating shift on Hide’s eyes that a paranoid part of Kaneki immediately felt the instinctual kick to fight or flight: to let away or to never let go.

“Of course.” Kaneki smiled wider, cheeks hurting.

“Of course.” Hide replied, an hour later, when they ended up baking cake and Kaneki was surprised at the way he accepted the taste, finding bits of Hide’s scent mixed in his tongue when he beat the dough with bare hands. Wiping sweat on his pants carelessly, Hide beamed again. “Figured you’d still love sweet things.”

 

-

 

Kaneki opened the café for his morning shift, feeling light-headed and unsteady.

Touka was already there, perched on her favorite stool, wiping coffee mugs. When she saw him coming, there was a pause long enough to make him feel mortified.

“…do I look weird?” Kaneki asked, careful. He wondered if the ingested cake yesterday was discoloring his face. He could not vomit it out, not even if he wanted to. (He never did).

“No,” Touka said. A pause again. And then: “You are smiling.”

 

-

 

He still kept in touch with Rize.

Kaneki still saw her, sometimes; when someone hit him too hard, when he broke too many bones and cracked his head and bled too fast, when his vision swam and he was reading old books smelling of fading perfume and long forgotten memories – purple proses about pale skin and marble eyes and smooth dark hair: a classic monster skin. Literature didn’t really change in the most essential of ways, Rize had always said, and Kaneki had a soft spot for unpopular opinions.

Today she chose a leather-bound _Dear Kafka–_ a personal good excuse for an overly sweet latte she always liked–quietlywatching the fight from the sidelines.

“Stop getting distracted, kid,” some… _thing_ said. “Die already, I’m starving.”

Kaneki blinked and looked down. Apparently _it_ had ripped a long line through his chest: ribcage clawed open in a slow systematic breakdown, one bone after another; a complete set of undone buttons. His bleeding heart fluttered shyly in exposure. Admittedly, there was something almost… perverse _,_ in baring his insides to the world.

_(Aw, such an introvert,_ Hide would tease, and Kaneki nearly laughed. His lungs gulped metallic air from their direct surroundings and he thought, after months of running away, that this is what freedom should feel like.)

His stomach felt full and warm. Probably internal rupture.

Kaneki lied there motionless on the ground, bleeding and beyond recognition, patient and waiting; open heart slowly mending back into chambers, fractured ribs shutting back into a cage. He wondered if multiple organ damage could be counted as internal conflict – _delicacy in extremeness,_ as it said— but no, inadequate plot twist could make a bad main protagonist. The metaphor should be more honest, executed perfectly in an angular iambic pentameter: _sire, there is a battle in my heart; that would not let me sleep, methought I lay worse than the mutines in the bilboes._ The allegory was beautiful and amusingly relatable, but Kaneki considered an improvisation with, _I lay worse than insect falling in love with boots,_ with his head lolled to a side, angle too wrong to be called natural.

There was a soft _click_ of dislocated shoulder finding its way back to the socket; and Kaneki stretched, feeling soft and indulgent. The repositioned arm reached to pick up his discarded mask, relishing in scent of leather and the snug comfort of artificial skin on his split head. Rich veins bled, finally, into a single black – that _something_ choked in surprise.

“Don’t worry about that pest, dear.” Rize assured. “You look handsome.”

She watched the visceral grin ripping open inch by inch through a slow, torturous half-sided laughter to reveal a smile. It was pulled more to the left than to the right, but the lopsided quality of its curve assured its true sincerity, as for a breathless second Rize remembered why she had looked at him in the eye and _hello,_ so suddenly it surprised herself, _you look delicious_.

Kaneki opened his mouth, slowly; something mirthful was bubbling inside his chest, nameless and dark, the feeling granular and effervescent. His stomach felt toofull with apparently _nothing_ , like it was going to burst into a million voids; breaking free and writhing away like a thousand arms. Rize’s warmth seeped through _it_ like an intimate embrace. Slinking. Wrapping. Tearing. And the resulting whimper was, _oh,_ something that Kaneki felt more than heard. He could recite the whole sensation from heart, this hunger; the way it made him feels airy and light.

 “Congratulations, Kaneki-kun.” Rize felt his grumbling stomach as Kaneki cocked his head in an almost horizontal angle, feeling spines tie together. The cracking sound was doubled when he stepped on _its_ bone, question at his eyes, and then tripled when she burst into an amused, fractured giggle. It sounded like cheap purple prose. “Now you have become the boot.”

She was such a wonderful poet.

 

-

 

“How much weight did you lose again,” one breakfast, it was finally a reprimand.

Hide treated him a cup of cappuccino and Kaneki breathed in a mix of familiar scent, his empty stomach feeding greedily on delicious _nothing_. Rize filled his insides full with equal amounts: flaw and power, satisfaction and hunger, flesh of both human and monster. Last night Touka stood by his side when Kaneki came back – from, apparently, a ghoul fight –and immediately proceeded to vomit a whole person.

(It was himself.)

“Not much.” Kaneki managed to grin.

“Really?” Hide hummed, and then looked straight at his eyes. Kaneki felt his eyepatch peeled away, ribcage ripped slow and open, heart fluttering again with exposure. Bare. “I know when you are lying, stupid.” Hide pulled his cheeks away with more force and finally, finally they _snapped._ Erased Kaneki’s grin. Replaced it with a crooked smile. “I want the truth.”

Touka snorted, a sound something strangely soft-edged, then handed Hide a cup of his order. “Truth is,” she huffed to the whipped cream, “your friend is actually a ghoul and wastes away to keep from eating you.”

This time, Hide laughed.

 

-

 

  _(fin)._

 

 


End file.
